Syria's civil war: Will al Qaeda be the real winner?

A jihadist rebel group fighting against the Assad regime just joined forces with the global terrorist network

An Al Nusra fighter runs as the group's base is shelled in Raqqa province on March 14.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Hamid Khatib)

The leader of Syria's Al Nusra Front, an Islamist rebel group, pledged allegiance to al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri on Wednesday. The announcement came hours after al Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq said it had merged with the Syrian jihadists. Al Nusra, which the U.S. has already designated as a terrorist organization, has claimed responsibility for a rising number of deadly suicide bombings targeting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and his supporters. And the oath from Al Nusra chief Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani came after Zawahiri urged the Syrian group to replace Assad's government with an Islamic state, angering other rebels, who are fighting an ever bloodier civil war and hoping for free elections.

Reports of the merger between Al Nusra and al Qaeda in Iraq did not come as a shock. "There were numerous reasons to see al Qaeda's hand in the Al Nusra Front from the very beginning," says Thomas Joscelyn at The Weekly Standard. Clearly, the global terrorist network "has considered Iraq and Syria as one theater for war" since 2011, the year the uprising against Assad began. Still, this development promises to complicate the West's effort to help the Syrian opposition.

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Harold Maass, The Week US

Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.